Golliwogs politically correct or not?

For some rather odd reason I have been knitting golliwogs.  I suppose in these days of political correctness I should call them gollidolls.  I have knitted four of them and have to give them lovely curly hair.  There are a lot of ways to do it but none of them work particularly well.  I tried to follow the instructions for knitting the hair but failed miserably.  Someone suggested I use a crochet hook to pull the pieces of wool through.  This was not successful at all as it pulled the filling out at the same time.  Finally after fiddling around for about an hour I finally I managed to sew on the hair thread by thread.  It is my version of the Advanced Hair Studio for men.  To say that it is labour intensive is and understatement.  It took me seven and a half hours to sew the hair onto something the size of a small ball.  It is bigger than a golf ball and not quite as big as a tennis ball.  Seven and a half hours.  It is a good job I have plenty of time on my hands.  Let's face it, it is the best excuse to sit on my fat bum for hours and hours.  I don't have to feel guilty about being lazy.

I have three more gollies to go and then I have four or five dolls that will need hair as well.  At least they will not be black.  I think my problems today can be blamed on trying to see what I was doing when I couldn't see the wool properly.  I am planning on using shocking pink hair for one of the baby dolls and a rather eccentric blue for the boy doll.  I also made about twelve or thirteen little dolls that thankfully do not need hair.  I only have to stuff them and embroider faces and buttons etcetera.  Hopefully I will be finished doing these dolls by the time that the babies I am doing them for reach puberty.

I might get a table at the Grenville Centre's night market in November and try to sell the dolls there.  I really don't know why I torture myself by making something that takes forever to do and that no-one wants to pay for.  The left over dolls will be going to the Lyell McEwin Hospital to be used as trauma dolls.  Mostly the kids get trauma teddies but I am sure they will like my little creatures.  The warmer weather is coming so I won't be doing any more knitting this year.

Now I am back at the beginning.  Are golliwogs politically incorrect?  They are dear little black dolls with fuzzy hair and surely not impinging on African-American sensibilities.  I certainly don't want to insult anyone so if calling them Gollidolls is more to people's taste I am fine with that.  I had a home made golliwog when I was a little girl.  Evidently I wanted the Golli that some little kid had and made such a fuss that a lady called Mum in to her house where she sewed me a funny little doll.  She sewed on a little face and some red hair around the top and I loved it better than any doll that I was given afterwards.  I still had it up until the child of my loins came along, however, it was moth eaten and not suitable for her.  One of the Navy wives got her Mum to knit a gorgeous one for her.  She still has it but it is stored in a box so could be moth eaten itself by now.  I love golliwogs, always did and always will politically correct or not.

Judgemental people

I am watching the news and have just noticed the sports reporter has the largest head.  His body is quite slim and compact but the head, oh my goodness it is absolutely huge.  As Mum used to say, maybe he was behind the door when heads and bodies were matched up.

It is a sad thing that people make judgements on the outer shell of a person's body.  It seems quite normal to pick on someone's weight or their hair or makeup.  I have a large nose and was tortured for years by the kids at school.  Now that I am an adult, albeit an extremely mature adult, I felt that I was over the whole big nose thing but someone pointed out to me recently that my nose was enormous.  I have now reverted to covering up my nose as much as possible.  Yes I already know that noses like ear lobes continue to grow as we age.  You can imagine that if my nose was big when I was at school just how large it is now.  I am frankly frightened that I might inhale a small child through my huge nostrils.  My nostrils are what stopped me from learning how to waterski.  Every time I nearly got up on the skis the water rushed up my nose and started to drown me so I had to let go the rope.

I am a 'fatist,' that is like racist but about picking on those people I perceive as being great fat obese, enormous and gigantic people.  I can say I am a 'fatist' because I am fat and therefore I am able to pick at other fat people.  I am especially pleased when I can say that someone has a bum that looks like two cats fighting under their skirt.  If the person has a particularly large bottom I call it two dogs fighting. It is a code that my daughter and I use.  We just whisper to each other, 'two dogs' and point. The largest bum I ever saw was 'two elephants' and I am still wondering how the person managed to walk at all.  Luckily I do not have a huge bum, however, my stomach is grossly large.  I have taken to trawling through the preggie clothes at K-mart for something to disguise my tummy.

Shallow me also picks on hair styles, tight clothes, muffin tops, camel toes, frayed jeans and track pants, all kinds of piercings, oh and those awful things that boys have in their ear lobes, plus tattoos.  I am sure I have many more little snippy things that I can pick on but that will do for the moment.

When it comes to judgemental people I am quite possibly the Queen. Were I thin and pretty and had a nice little nose I might have a reason to be picky.  I am none of these things.  What I am is an old grumpy woman with too much time on her hands whose only joy in life is to make fun of people who are no funnier than me.  So take it from me if you look like Jabba the Hutt like I do you shouldn't criticise others.        

Turning into my Mum

I am wearing a singlet, to be a little more precise I am wearing a spencer.  When I was still under the authoritarian Mother's rule I had to fight long and hard not to be forced to wear a singlet.  At the time I had just started working and thin blouses were fashionable.  The material was thin so you could see the singlet through the material.  The girls at work used to make fun of me all the time so I had to go to battle with the Mother about my singlet wearing.  Absolutely everything I wanted to do was deemed wrong by the Horrid Woman.  Wearing of singlets was high on her list of appropriate wear.

I don't think anyone can imagine the battle it took for me to go to work with only a bra (perish the thought) under my top.  It took long arguments and then a few weeks of her not speaking to me just to make a point.  While this seems like such a silly thing to fight over it was normal for me to have to go through this process for everything that I wanted to do, not matter how trivial it was.  Nothing was trivial to That Woman.
Previously I fought a world war with her when I refused to wear my singlet under my bra.  She said it stopped one sweating and I countered with the (if you are not wearing a singlet you wouldn't sweat argument.)

Now to get back to where I started.  I am wearing a spencer.  What has happened to me?  Perhaps I am colder than I used to be before I got to be pre-senile.  Perhaps the Bossy Woman gene has finally surfaced.  All I know is that I am doing precisely what I fought for Mum about so many years ago.  Of course I would not be found dead wearing a singlet in the hot weather.  I won't need a singlet to soak up the sweat I will sweat on my t-shirt or tank top.

What next though?  I dread the fact that I might start to look for bloomers in the shops.  That is all I need to find bloomers and horror of horrors wear them.  If you don't know what bloomers are I suggest that you do a google search.  As I remember it they were always a revolting pinkie colour (perhaps flesh.)  They were vile and hideous things and of course much prized by the Awful Woman.

It is said that girls turn in to their mothers so I am watching out for further signs of my degeneration to the level of bossiness and a general refusal to see anyone's point of view but my own.  So far so good, however, I am wearing a spencer (what can I say?)

Education Department

When I first left school I got a job at the Department of Education.  I was so excited about having a job but soon found out how boring it was.  I was a typist but the kind of typist that cannot really type.  I had to plough  on and on typing up lists of their paid work force.  The lists took forever to type and were brain numbingly BORING.

The other part of my job was to type out cheques for all the teachers in all the schools in the whole state.  One might think that this was preferable to the incredibly long lists, however, that would be an error.  Error being of course the operative word.  If one mistake was made on the cheque it could be signed by the 'Overseer' (she was of course of real joy to work for.)  If two mistakes were made the cheque had to be cancelled.  The idea was that one mistake in one hundred was passable but in my case it was one cancellation in every ten.  The more the 'Overseer' told me off the worse my typing got.  She used to fan the mistakes out of the main body of all the cheques and take them in to the 'Uber Overseer' who truly loathed me.

Although I loved working with the other women in the typing pool I was just not suited to being a typist.  Eventually I was advised by the 'Uber Overseer' that I had to either resign or they would sack me.  I was upset but so so so relieved.  Within a couple of weeks I managed to get a job with the Woodville Council as a typist but didn't take that job because I got a job at Customs and Excise as a clerical assistant.  This folks meant no more typing.

To be fair to the Education Department they were kind enough to keep me on there for about four months and put up with my atrocious typing.  I think it was a steep learning curve for them and for me.  I only wish that we had had computers back then.  I wouldn't have needed carbon paper and white out and erasers.  I could have typed along on my merry way making mistake after mistake and fix them using the cursor.  How I love cursors.

The best thing about the Education Department I found was to not actually work there!

Teachers?

This week in the free newspaper there was an article about a local high school.  It appears that Year 11 students are being paid to coach younger students.  The tutors are paid $15 per hour.  The article stated that the students would be able to explain information is a simpler way so the younger students understand the concepts. At first I thought what a great idea.  It is good for the older students to help those younger plus they get a little extra money for doing so.  However, I may be confused but I thought that teachers taught students to understand  concepts in a simplified manner as part of their job.

I am so frustrated by this story that for once I am at a loss for words.  It is 2012 and teachers pay students to teach other students.  The mind boggles.  TEACHERS TEACH RIGHT???????????????????????

Having thought a little more about this subject I realize that slower students do need a little extra time to catch on to some subjects, therefore a tutor is the way to go.  I know that I needed my friends to help me with maths.  My maths teacher was wonderful and so patient, however, I really needed someone to go over and over things with me.  Teachers can only do so much in a classroom situation.  Therefore, I withdraw some of my rantings but not all of them.

Obsessive compulsive procrastinator rules

I have passed through my reading frenzy and am now madly knitting.  I think I may just have an obsessive compulsive problem.  I need to be thoroughly involved with something that stops me from walking, exercising, cleaning, tidying and even cooking.  The best hobby is the one that takes up almost every waking moment. So you can see that reading and knitting are the top pursuits for someone that takes passivity to an abnormal level.  I could also say that I watch television all the time but really at the moment there is not a lot on that I find interesting.  I do find that television has a rather soporific effect on me.

I have been trying to think of things to do to get me out of the house.  My first plan is to take a table and chair outside and read and knit in the sun.  This does not fix my problem.  I could of course garden, (that noise was the sound of hell freezing over.)  I could go down to the beach with the little old poodle and walk along in the sand.  Now I know I don't actually like to walk all that much but the beach is a different thing altogether. I need to save up for a while, say a month or two to pay for the petrol to go to the beach, but I am sure every now and again I could go for a pay day walkie.  The best thing about walkies on the beach is the ice-cream that me and the little man eat before we zoom (putter) home in the car.

Even though I really loathe walking there is a place in Gawler called Dead Man's Pass that is a brilliant walk. There are paths and a creek with little ponds and a couple of hills that I refuse to let beat me.  Now here is the  root of my problem.  I love that walk there but I just cannot get myself to go.  My friend, God love her, tries to winkle me out of the house but I just sit in my chair knit.  If I am not knitting I am reading.

They say that procrastination is the thief of time and in my case I think that they got that right.  Procrastinator is my middle name.  Cushie Procrastinator that is me.  I will walk tomorrow, I will exercise (never,) I will pull out the weeds later, (much later,) I will rejuvenate the Casa del Cushie by dusting and mopping and cleaning the windows later, tomorrow, in an hour, tonight, in the morning, when I have time.

The thing I always have time is for it doing some sedentary thing.  Oh what could it be, surely not reading and knitting and wasting time, all the time.  If there was a degree in procrastination I would have it.  Cushie, BA majoring in absolutely nothing.

The worst thing is that at the end of each misspent day I am tired.  What the hell from?  I certainly haven't done anything.  Evidently procrastination is very enervating.  I should know, I wrote the book.

red pee

Whaddya do when your pee comes out red.

1. Panic
2. Panic
3. Google
4. Read many googles
5. Figure out you ate lots of beetroot
6. Let breath out
9. Resolve not to eat too much beetroot ever again

and 10 Relax